I have been doing Europe map quizzes and most of them list the following as "countries": Andorra, Luxembourg, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Malta, San Marino, and Vatican City.
I am wondering why such small pieces of land would be considered their own country and not swallowed by a larger neighbouring country, especially when the cultures are so similar. I understand that for the Vatican City, it's due to the dispute between the Italian government and the Catholic Church.
To confuse things further, this article says that "Monaco, Singapore, and Vatican City are considered the only true city-states." - what? Why are the other countries less "true"? And what is the purpose of a city state anyway?
Thanks for helping!
A "true" city state would be a country where most of the landmass is actually taken up by built up urban areas. That is definitely the case for Monaco and Singapore (the Vatican City isn't really a "proper" city but still fits the definition). It's not the case for say Andorra or Luxembourg or San Marino, who have multiple cities, towns and villages and a countryside in between.
You'll notice that most of the European ministates are monarchies. Luxembourg is a grand duchy, Liechtenstein and Monaco principalities and Andorra jointly reigned over by the Spanish king and French president. The Pope is technically a monarch. Odd ones out are San Marino and Malta, which are republics. For the monarchies it mostly comes down to hereditary privileges and, though someone might speak about this in more detail than I do, certain, mostly financial benefits the existence of such small monarchies provides to their larger neighbors and to wealthy people seeking to park their liquid assets in a discreet location that happens to be fully sovereign...it's not by accident that most European ministates are very wealthy themselves with very high standards of living.
Singapore is an even more interesting case as it happens to sit in a geographically privileged location that allowed it to build large container ports and a completely disproportionally sized military and navy; and has had competent leadership that managed to unite the four main ethnic groups around a shared national ethos and discipline. It sits right by one of the most important waterways in the world and so barely any country that is interested in shipping goods from A to B can afford to bypass Singapore.